Nigeria has appointed a new head for its climate policy council for the third time in as many years, raising concern among campaigners who say frequent leadership changes could undermine the country’s efforts to tackle climate change.
President Bola Tinubu named climate finance expert and environmental lawyer Omotenioye Majekodunmi last week to lead the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), replacing Nkiruka Maduekwe, who led it for just a year.
With COP30 drawing near, Nigerian climate campaigner David Terungwa said yet another change at the NCCC’s helm could hamper preparations for the UN climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém in November.
“We are barely three months to the COP and you are bringing someone else … That’s not good [and] doesn’t show how serious Nigeria is,” he told Climate Home News.
“Last year … we didn’t even know who Nigeria’s negotiators were. We didn’t even hold the national pre-COP meeting to prepare. That was not good, and that was also because [Maduekwe] came in just before the COP,” he added.
Another prominent Nigerian climate activist, Olumide Idowu, said a new NCCC leader might invigorate the climate agenda, but warned that it could also “create uncertainty and disrupt continuity in policy implementation [and] significantly impact the country’s ambitions to host COP32”.
Majekodunmi and a spokesperson for Tinubu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tight deadline for NDC
Set up in 2021 under the Climate Change Act, the NCCC makes decisions and policies aimed at tackling climate change and ensures climate issues are included in state development plans and programmes. It is also involved in representing the country in global climate talks and drawing up the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
Countries are due to submit their updated NDCs next month, but Salisu Dahiru – the NCCC’s first director-general, said it would be difficult to meet the September deadline given the leadership handover. He noted that his administration had started work on the updated NDC, with work continued by Maduekwe’s team and now handed to Majekodunmi.
Under the terms of the 2021 law, NCCC director-generals have a four-year term. But three years since the council began operations, it has had three different heads and none of them have stayed in office for more than two years.
Dahiru, the first director-general, was dismissed in 2024 after Tinubu assumed Nigeria’s presidency a year earlier.
Tinubu, in a step that some climate campaigners said sidelined the NCCC, set up a presidential committee on climate action in May 2024 and appointed Ajuri Ngelale as the presidential special envoy to coordinate policies and programmes on climate action and green economic development.
Weeks later, he named Maduekwe as the NCCC’s new leader, and she represented the country at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and mid-year climate talks in Bonn.
Frequent changes
Dahiru said the frequent changes showed “they [the government] do not respect the provisions” of the Climate Change Act.
“The changing of the DG of the national council is governed by law, it’s an act in parliament that has been signed into law by the president, so if you want to remove somebody follow the law, what it says,” he told Climate Home.
Idowu echoed his remarks, saying the constant reshuffles suggested “a lack of respect for institutional integrity”.
Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, has recently sought to raise its profile in global climate talks.
In a bold statement at the close of COP29, former NCCC head Maduekwe called out Global North countries over the agreement to provide $300 billion of climate finance a year by 2035 – a small part of the $1.3 trillion that had been demanded by Global South nations.
Earlier this year, Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, visited the West African country for four days, meeting stakeholders in the capital, Abuja, and the most populous city of Lagos. During the visit, he urged the country to deliver a strong NDC, saying that could “supercharge the Nigerian economy” and position Nigeria as a leader in climate action.
Maduekwe used the opportunity to pitch Nigeria’s interest in hosting COP32 in Lagos in 2027, when the hosting of the annual conference rotates back to Africa. She said Nigeria had shown leadership as a “champion” of climate action, adding that Africa’s most populated city “has what it takes to host COP32”.
But Terungwa said Maduekwe’s replacement renews doubts about the role Nigeria can play in international climate talks.
He said that, besides understanding climate science, the council’s new head will need to “develop skills in negotiations, emotional intelligence, organising, mobilizing and partnership building”.